Health and Society

The Graduate Center offers an interdisciplinary graduate concentration in Health and Society studies. The concentration draws on doctoral programs in anthropology, economics, educational psychology, history, political science, psychology, and sociology.

The courses offered in this concentration are designed to provide historical, theoretical, and critical perspectives on health and society. The concentration's multi- and interdisciplinary approach will enable students to bring a new outlook to their own research, apply their disciplines' training to the resolution of health problems, and understand more fully the implications of the work done in their disciplines on health policy and related social issues.

Students in this concentration will be encouraged to link academic concerns and research to "real-world" issues. The emphasis will be on relating theory and research findings to applied health policy issues. The use of the term health and society, rather than illness and society, reflects the basic orientation of the program. Program participants are concerned with all of the following issues: shifting the focus from cure alone to education and prevention, the multicultural beliefs and practices that foster well-being, the role of community members as consumers of health care and active participants in health decision-making, the financing of health care and its just distribution, and a multietiological mode of disease processes that includes psychosocial, biobehavioral, cultural, economic, political, and historical factors.

Students who wish to pursue the interdisciplinary concentration in Health and Society, should be enrolled in one of the relevant doctoral programs and will be expected to meet the requirements of that program. Students can create a specialization in health and society under the guidance of the Interdisciplinary Studies Committee and specialists within their own doctoral program.

For additional information contact Professor Suzanne C. Ouellette, Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Concentration in Health and Society, Ph.D. Program in Psychology/Social-Personality, The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, 1-212-817-8708.

[Bulletin, 10/01; pp. 292-308]